The origins of the fairy tale have been traced as far back as Egypt in the thirteenth century before Christ,3
but modern readers know the genre from Charles Perrault's printed
adaptations of popular folktales like "Cinderella" and "Little Red
Riding Hood" in 1697 (Mother Goose Tales) and the Grimm Brothers'
somewhat sanitized updates in the early 1800s. A few decades later,
Hans Christian Andersen brought new readers to the genre by writing new
stories. With the advent of movies in the 20th century, fairy tales,
which had never really vanished from the literary landscape, resurfaced
as an important cultural form in feature films by Disney, but these were
less a rethinking of the genre than an elaborate visual recapitulation,
in plush and suffocating detail, of Perrault and Grimm. It was in the
Hollywood cartoon short, and especially the work of Tex Avery at Warner Bros. and M-G-M, that a truly modern version of the fairy tale emerged.

With
their simple storylines and language, exotic backgrounds, supernatural
and melodramatic elements, interplay between animal and human
characters, and frequent child heroes and heroines, fairy tales were an
obvious choice of subject matter for Hollywood animators, just as they
were for the medieval mothers who used them to entertain and instruct
their children. (The fact that these stories, based on long-standing
oral traditions, predate the copyright laws and were thus free to adapt
was surely another factor.) In works like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
(1938), Disney brought the terror of "Old Europe," with its misshapen
men, paranoia-inducing forests, and witches masquerading as kindly
apple-sellers, to American audiences searching for fresh thrills. A work
like The Three Little Pigs (1933) played off classic childhood
fears of an unstable world plagued by male-identified monsters (the
wolf-father) whose perverse purpose in life was their destruction.
Perrault's versions of the fairy tales stressed morality by negative
example: in his "Little Red Riding Hood," Red foolishly chats with a
stranger (the wolf), and both she and her grandmother are devoured,
while the wolf lives to eat again. The Grimms disliked this scenario,
and borrowed a hunter from another source; in their version the hunter
kills the wolf and slits open its belly, freeing the undigested Granny
and Red. Disney followed Perrault in creating frightening worlds seen
from a child's perspective and the Grimm Brothers in imposing a happy
ending. From both sources Disney drew its devotion to a classical unity,
what Bettelheim identifies in fairy tales as the all-important process
of "bringing order out of chaos."4

Not
everyone in Hollywood was so enamored of order or happy endings or the
sentimental school of mindless, grinning "funny little animals." Perhaps
the least enamored was Tex Avery, who during his stint at Warner Bros.
and M-G-M made seven formal, recognizable fairy tales and one related
blackout film (A Gander at Mother Goose) between 1937 (Little Red Walking Hood) and 1949 (Little Rural Riding Hood).
These cartoons represent an assault on the Bettelheim school that sees
fairy tales as the source of moral instruction for youth, and, closer to
home, on the Disney aesthetic. Avery's versions of these archetypal
stories, made to satisfy both children and adults, attempt to reverse
Bettelheim by "bringing chaos out of order." For young audiences, Avery
preserves the trappings of the genre — talking animals, supernatural
events — and adds the cinematic touch of physical law constantly
challenged. For adults, he litters his work with sexual innuendo and
distancing devices that replace the sense of reassuring archetypes with a
modernist construct that merges the story with its audience, puts adult
preoccupations (e.g., sex) in place of children's, and imagines
characters not as clueless tabula rasas awaiting moral enlightenment but
as sophisticated, willful creatures with a bottomless bag of tricks.
Avery's fairy tales jettison the whole idea of morality, along with
other troublesome concepts like logic, sense, and sexual repression. He
brings the "big bad wolves" and "red riding hoods" out of the sanctity
of the linear narrative and into the service of the gag, creating in the
process a unique world of self-conscious "cartoon actors" who know
they're in a cartoon and freely comment on their status as fictional
creations, undercutting the story at every turn. Part of this approach
was an outgrowth of the collaboration of Avery with fellow renegades
Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and other denizens of Warner Bros.' "Termite
Terrace," but Avery's application of modernist elements to an ancient
cultural form is the most complex and extreme of the lot.

Avery's dislike of Disney's sentimental
excesses fueled much of his work, and the first thing we notice about
his versions of similar material are the radically different settings.
Whereas in a film like Snow White Disney painstakingly reproduced
the forest backdrop familiar from the written fairy tale, Avery
dispenses entirely with such imagery in favor of urban hot-spots like
pool halls and nightclubs. Much of the action of his most famous fairy
tales — Red Hot Riding Hood, Swing Shift Cinderella, and Little Rural Riding Hood — takes place in a nightclub. In Cinderella Meets Fella,
he masterfully merges the traditions of Old Europe and New America in a
single image: a bar called "Ye Olde Beere Jointe." Where Avery does use
the kind of rural setting common to fairy tales, he makes it
insufferably Disneyesque; in The Bear's Tale, the camera
self-consciously pans the same woodland so many times, with a mocking
narrator each time intoning ". . .the beautiful green forest," that the
effect becomes purposely enervating. For Disney, the visual truth of a
setting, and the resulting suspension of disbelief, was crucial in
involving the viewer in the world onscreen. For Avery, the logic of the
gag, which frequently called attention to the story-as-invention, always
surpasses the need for mere verisimilitude.

The fairy tale plot tends to be grimly
schematic and deterministic: the reader knows that dire events will
follow from Red Riding Hood telling the wolf where her grandmother
lives. Avery's "plots" (one must use quote marks) are filled with
distancing devices and narrative ruptures that make the universe appear
far less predictable. In The Bear's Tale, the story itself is
fractured, as Red Riding Hood inexplicably appears in what's supposed to
be an account of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." (Red saves Goldie
from the wolf by reaching over the split-screen line that separates
them.) In Little Red Walking Hood, the action of the story is
interrupted, to the loud disgust of the actor-wolf and actor-girl, by
what appear to be real-life silhouettes of people clumsily entering the
theatre and trying to find a seat to see the cartoon. Cinderella Meets Fella
has a happier version of this distancing device, as Cinderella
disappears, only to turn up as a real-life shadow waving and yelling at
"Fella" (who's still onscreen and in the narrative proper) from the
audience watching the cartoon. Avery's inclusion of the audience — even
in silhouette form — in the story undermines the linear narrative, and
any potential moral that might be derived from it, by pointing out that
these are, after all, only fictional inventions.

Avery has never been considered a
"personality animator" in the mode of Disney, and never thought of
himself as such, though it's hard not to see "personality" in characters
like the eternally aroused Wolf, or the stupidly self-absorbed papa
Bear in The Bear's Tale, or for that matter in his sexy, droll
Cinderellas and Red Riding Hoods. While Disney is correctly credited
with singlehandedly rescuing the animated cartoon from the simple gag
orientation of the silent era, many of his much-vaunted "characters" are
quite dull, particularly the saccharine fairy tale heroines Cinderella
and Snow White. (He got more mileage out of the Wolf in the Three Little Pigs,
perhaps because of that film's unavoidable connection to the too-close
terrors of the Depression.) Contrast the Disney version with Avery's Swing Shift Cinderella.
Key elements of this familiar tale are blithely dumped; there's no
glass slipper here, or tearful reunion with the prince. (There's no
prince.) For love interest, Avery recruits Red Riding Hood's horny Wolf.
Cinderella's no longer the timid drudge of Disney, Grimm, or Perrault,
but a busty pin-up babe who does a sexy song-and-dance act that drives
the wolf into a frenzy of lust. The story becomes increasingly
unrecognizable, no longer a morality tale about the rewards of being
"good" but a campy erotic farce in which the Wolf pursues Cinderella
while trying to resist the equally frantic attentions of an aged fairy
godmother on the make.

Avery's relentless sexual motifs are a crucial part of his attack on Disney. In The Bear's Tale,
Goldilocks is skipping through the forest with exaggeratedly cloying
moves, swinging her hands wildly through the air with a vacuous grin.
But it's typical of Avery that he rescues her from the Disneyesque
bathos her first appearance implies; she confronts the Wolf in Grandma's
bed, and he's disgusted with the fact that she's not Red Riding Hood.
She then does a surprisingly lascivious stroll in front of him and says
provocatively, "What's she got that I haven't got?" Red is no longer the
blank identification figure of the written versions, waiting for rescue
by the hunter, but a willful, sexually aware gamin who may be as
attracted to the wolf as he is to her. Little Red Walking Hood is
another visually childlike character, at least in height, who shows an
adult sexuality; her courtship by the wolf is typical of a kind of comic
quasi-bestiality theme that runs through Avery's work.

Avery
discussed this idea in an interview with Joe Adamson; it was something
he was well aware of in his career because he had censorship problems
with it. The title character of Red Hot Riding Hood was designed
as a pin-up, to boost Army morale, but the Hays Office objected to the
wolf's reaction to Red — "showing body heat, the steam coming out of the
collar, and the tongue rolling out" and forced Avery to make cuts.
"Sometimes we would just stiffen him out in mid-air; he'd make a take
and his whole body would stiffen out like an arrow! And they cut that
one out on us." Such imagery was apparently important enough to Avery
that, rather than capitulate, he devised a strategy to salvage it. He
would insert a number of over-the-top gags he knew would be cut, and the
ones he really wanted would be left alone by a then-satisfied censor.5 Like Djuna Barnes, Avery knew that kids — and soldiers — "like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!"

Judging from the numbers, Little Red Riding
Hood was Avery's favorite fairy-tale heroine; he did three versions of
her story with Little Red Walking Hood, Red Hot Riding Hood, and Little Rural Riding Hood, and couldn't resist introducing her into The Bear's Tale, his update of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." He did the Cinderella story twice, once at Warners (Cinderella Meets Fella) and once at MGM (Swing Shift Cinderella). The "Three Little Pigs" appear twice — once in the Hitler satire Blitz Wolf and once as part of a gallery of fairy tale characters in A Gander at Mother Goose. Some notes on these films follow.

A Gander at Mother Goose (1940) and Blitz Wolf (1942)

A Gander at Mother Goose is not a
fairy tale proper, but a collection of blackout sketches based on
fairy-tale characters that serves as a kind of mini-encyclopedia of
Avery's fairy-tale gags and motifs. There's nudity (Humpty-Dumpty's fall
tears his pants, revealing a very human pair of buttocks);
quasi-incestuous sex (Jack and Jill go up the hill to make love);
scatology (a dog wishes for a tree and becomes hysterically happy when
it appears); and Disney sentimentality and payback (a cloying Little
Hiawatha is berated by an eagle for shooting him in the ass). There's
also an amusingly topical sequence based on "The Three Little Pigs"; the
Wolf's slobbering, spitting exhalations force the disgusted pigs to
hand him a bottle of mouthwash, and the embarrassed wolf's screamed
response is a satire of a catchline from an ad for a then-popular
mouthwash: "Why don't some of my best friends TELL me these things?"

Much
of Disney's version of the "Three Little Pigs" is focused on the
building of the houses. Avery, less interested in the virtues of the
work ethic, minimizes this process in his take on the story. Blitz Wolf
is an elaborate send-up of Hitler, who appears here as Avery's
ubiquitous, comically pompous Wolf. The war, and catering to "our boys"
who were fighting it, gives Avery the excuse to insert some surprisingly
up-front sex gags. In one of his most blatant, the militant pig
counters a very phallic missile with a copy of Esquire magazine.
With a lewd smile, he holds up a cheesecake image, which causes the
missile to retreat, bring back a group of its "friends," who then line
up at stiff attention, emit a scream the viewer can't help but read as
an orgasm, then fall limp back to Earth.

Cinderella Meets Fella (1938) and Swing Shift Cinderella (1943)

Egghead, a precursor of Elmer Fudd, is the
"fella" of the title, and his co-star bears little resemblance to the
sexpot created five years later for Swing Shift Cinderella. She's
small, more like a midget than a child, but feisty; desperate to locate
her fairy godmother, she screams with a man's voice at the police: "GO
GET HER, BOYS!" As in the other fairy-tale films, the godmother here is a
lush, a fact well known to the police who are helping Cinderella find
her ("Don't worry, lady, we'll search every beer joint in town!"). The
opening frames offer a neat precis of Avery's style, starting with a
formal, traditional image and sound (a fancy invitation to the ball,
with appropriately courtly music) but quickly moving into the modern era
(the invitation ends with an ad for "Sweeney's Drive-In" with a hot
jazz background). Cinderella Meets Fella is also prescient: in an
early, ironic variety of the much-loathed "product placement" of
present-day cinema, Fella finds a note from his beloved that says "Dear
Princy. . . went to a Warner Bros. show."

Five years later, Avery abandoned the brassy midget of Cinderella Meets Fella in favor of a more mature version. The title character in Swing Shift Cinderella
is one of Avery's war-effort creations, a sexy pin-up girl come to life
to show the American armed forces what they were fighting for. But
she's no lifeless love doll — besides her night job as a "Rosie the
Riveter" type steel plant worker, she's an entertainer at the local
nightclub. The fairy godmother doesn't dress her up for a prince but for
her nightclub act, "Oh Wolfie!", a lurid display intended to drive the
Wolf crazy. Cinderella, wielding a huge mallet, is as violent in her
rejection of the Wolf as he is in his attempts to nail her. Swing Shift Cinderella
is justly famous for a series of phallic sight gags by the Wolf, but
the female characters are just as sexual and just as phallic. The fairy
godmother is as randy as the Wolf, the object of her desires, and
transforms herself into a kind of battering ram as she tries to land
him. In one trick, she shoots a plunger at him, which then becomes a
fishing rod that lets her reel him in.

The Bear's Tale (1940)

This
short, an amalgam of "Goldilocks" and "Little Red Riding Hood," is a
masterpiece of self-reflexivity, with many of the gags based on
narrative breakdowns. The Wolf reads the "Goldilocks" story that he's
appearing in. Papa Bear claims he knows it's only Goldilocks upstairs,
not a robber, because "I read this story last week in Reader's Digest."
Best of all is the scene in which Red, with a broad New York accent,
teams up with Goldie to defeat the wolf: "Hello, Goldie! This is Red
Ridin' Hood. I just found a note from that skunk the Wolf. . ." Avery's
suspension of physical law allows Red, who's in a different location
from Goldie, to reach across the screen's dividing line and hand her a
note. Avery is a literal presence in much of his work; here he "appears"
as the voice of the buffoonish, self-entranced Papa Bear, whose laugh
is like a heartier version of Screwy Squirrel's obnoxious cackle.

Little Red Walking Hood is the first
of Avery's three formal adaptations of this story. He was apparently so
intrigued by something in the story that he even allows it to bleed
into The Bear's Tale, his version of "Goldilocks and the Three
Bears." Here he blatantly exploits what is implicit, but often
unacknowledged, in the written fairy tale: the idea of the Wolf going to
bed with Red. The bare bones of the story are intact, but the
characters deviate entirely from the model, ridiculing each other and
the story, and generally sending up the solemnity of the proceedings.
The Wolf courts Red not because he wants to get Granny's address but
because he's hot for Red. But she is one of Avery's many unobtainable
women; she's bored by the Wolf and shows it by giving him the literal
cold shoulder. Granny, like the old women in other Avery fairy tales, is
a lush who interrupts the Wolf's attack on her to order "a case of gin"
from the local grocer. (She also addresses the audience directly: "Will
you people pardon me just a minute?") Even the climax is not safe from
Avery's self-reflexive gags; Red and the Wolf stop their fistfight to
denounce two patrons getting into their chairs in the theatre where this
cartoon is playing. As "cartoon actors," Granny and the Wolf
collaborate in continuing the drama: when the Wolf hears Red coming, he
panics, and Granny quickly hands him her clothes so he can dress up like
her for the next scene.

In the opening sequence of Red Hot Riding Hood,
a simpering narrator says, "Good evening, kiddies! Once upon a time
Little Red Riding Hood was skipping through the woods. . ." But this
time the Wolf stops and refuses to continue: "I'm fed up with that sissy
stuff . . . Every Hollywood studio has done it this way!" Taken aback
by this sudden revolt, which Granny and Red also join in, the shocked
narrator agrees to try a new tack. Thus the terrified little-girl Red is
reborn as a red-hot mama who performs at the local nightclub. Her
lyrics are unapologetic in demanding material reward for sexual favors:
"Hey Daddy . . . you better get the best for me!" But, as in Swing Shift Cinderella,
Avery surprises by devoting most of the time to the Wolf's frantic
attempts to escape the violent attentions of an older woman, Granny,
who's now a sex-mad hepcat.

In Little Rural Riding Hood,
the title character reaches the height of stylization; she's no longer a
child-image, nor a sexy pinup, but a hybrid: tall, ugly, and angular,
with prehensile toes that open and close doors on the Wolf's face. She's
also self-possessed and sexually volatile, though her voice sounds
suspiciously like Screwy Squirrel's taken down a register. The Wolf's
equally rabid; in a sequence that threatened to bring on the censors, he
insists he has no plans to eat Red: he wants more fleshly pleasures:
"Ah'm gonna chase her and catch her and kiss her and hug her and love
her and hug her and love her. . ." As so often in Avery, both Red and
the Wolf speak directly to the audience, not even bothering with the
"suspension of disbelief" that's critical to most fictional constructs,
literary or cinematic, but whose absence makes Avery even today the most
modern of cartoon auteurs.